Visithereto view the first issue of the Watermark Arts JOURNAL, The Artistry of Water.

Welcome to Watermark Arts

Watermark Arts brings together somatic awareness and artistic expression in the belief that both are essential aspects in creating a more humane and peaceful world.

The word soma, from the Greek somatikos, implies a fullness of presence in the living, sensate, wholeness of bodily being. With awareness of the integrity of the body, comes a felt experience of the interconnection of all living things as part of a larger whole.

In our modern, technologically-advanced era, somatic explorers exist near the cultural edge, holding this way of wholeness in the face of a widespread and pervasive sense of fragmentation.

Artists, too, live at the edge of culture, working with revolutionary ideas and symbolic messages encoded in dance, poetry, stories, music and visual art. As culture creators throughout history, artists have brought about substantive, peaceful change in society.

These times call on us to become generators of the culture we wish to live in. Creative acts show up in all aspects of life — in art, in teaching, in community-building. Watermarks asks, What happens when these creative acts are informed by somatic awareness? Can we bring into being a world permeated by a sense of wholeness and interconnection?

Elaine Colandrea
Artistic Director

Enlight and Desert Waves #3, Photographs by Prue Jeffries

Visit our galleries

Watermark Arts galleries currently feature forty artists representing all artistic media. We will continue to grow in 2018 with more somatically inspired art. Please use the menu at the top to visit galleries and learn more about individual artists, or click on any image in the slideshow.

A Moving Inquiry: The Art of Personal Practice

A 6-week online Continuum course, with Beth Pettengill Riley and Priscilla Auchincloss. We are currently transforming this offering into a self-guided course. Learn more.

Workshops

Somatic Movement Summit at Omega in Rhinebeck, New York, July 1-6. “Artful Embodiment: Diving in the Waters of Creation.” Learn more. And view our recent mailing about the summit here.

Watermarkings . . . Infusions of Art, Breath & Movement

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The Dream that led to Watermark Arts, by Elaine Colandrea

The name and vision for Watermark Arts came to me in a dream. The dream became a dance, which was photographed by Phyllis McCabe in July 2017.

A Moving Inquiry: The Art of Personal Practice A 6-week Online Continuum Course

with Beth Pettengill Riley and Priscilla Auchincloss

We are currently transforming this offering into a self-guided course. Stay tuned.

A question for our time: Is it possible to remain connected to our physical experience, and the treasure of creativity and wholeness that’s inherent there, as the world changes at so rapid a pace? If there’s one thing that flows through all the ways a person could valuably work with their physicality, it is the sense of inquiry.

In collaboration with Watermark Arts, Beth Pettengill Riley and Priscilla Auchincloss are creating an online program to guide you towards your true teacher: your own body. The purpose of this course is to help you establish a personal movement practice that serves as the foundation of your daily life.

Our lives are made of movements, and by bringing an organizing consciousness to our bodies through a personal movement practice, there’s a flow of intelligence from the natural world through our senses and tissues. Instead of living “on the surface,” we can know ourselves as part of nature’s body. This is all the more critical in the increasingly disembodied and fragmented modern times we live in. For those of us who, by fate or choice, find ourselves to be “movement people”, it is time to truly walk our talk and bring forward the wisdom of the body.

Living Prayer

On a freezing but sunny December day in 2017, the opportunity presented itself at Joy Brown on Broadway, a mile-long exhibit of nine sculptures in city parks, sponsored by the NYC Department of Parks with support from Purple Roof Atelier of Shanghai and Morrison Gallery, Kent, CT.